Tuesday, 27 May 2014

The perception of “London” – by which I really mean the
Metropolitan elite - as culturally and economically a place apart has
been growing for some time now, but it has surely now really crystallised in
the public minds over the last few weeks as to just how far removed from the
rest of Britain it really is. The orchestrated smear campaign against UKIP was
one of the most peculiar and grotesque things I have seen in all my years in
watching politics, but also one of the most revealing. Before our eyes the faux
competition and petty rivalries between different wings of the Establishment
melted away as they all began to sing from the same hymn sheet.

That hymn was a hymn of hate against UKIP, with every smear
possible dredged up in a desperate attempt to stop our advance. By extension it was
an attack on anyone sympathetic to UKIP’s views. It reached its nadir in the
articles of the Telegraph’s Dan Hodges. Accusing UKIP as being a racist party
on the ground that UKIP wanted to limit European immigration, his utterances
became ever more demented as time went on. Yesterday’s article reached new
depths by accusing UKIP of wanting a “culture war’ with London, adding for good
measure how superior he felt to the UKIP-voting classes.

However, Hodges distasteful contempt does show a wider, if
painful truth: we have to recognise that much of London and the rest of us have
what parting couples call “irreconcilable differences” and agree terms of
separation.

London has become the mecca for the international sovereign individual. Often but not always
particularly wealthy, they compromise highly educated and mobile people whose
skills are very much in demand and have, if anything, too many opportunities
rather than too few.The congratulate
themselves on their diversity, and yet their cultural standpoints are
remarkably homogenous; essentially rootless, this gilded minority think only in
terms of the future, never the past, and only ever consider relocating to other
international elite cities rather than somewhere more parochial: anyone
overhearing conversations on the tube in London is much more likely to hear
reference to relocating to San Francisco or Paris rather than they are Leeds or
Edinburgh.

To these people, the very concept of nationhood is
hopelessly outmoded and ergo discrimination on the basis of nationality is as
ridiculous as discrimination on the basis of race: in their minds, the very
word racist has mutated to cover either case. Dan Hodges outburst that UKIP must
be a “racist” party for wanting to limit European immigration makes perfect
sense from this standpoint.

However, what Hodges and his ilk cannot comprehend is that
nationality and nationhood confer definite social advantages whereas true
racism does not. A common culture that allows for a degree of shared sacrifice
is an obvious one, but also is the feeling that your life is part of a greater
whole, a shared endeavour.

Even if we shoot for the
stars, most of us end living fairly humdrum lives, and we console ourselves
that in our small way we are contributing the life of the society around us:
carrying the torch from our fathers generation before handing it on to our
children. What comes to matter to most of us in the end is “Faith,
Family and Flag”, as Phillip Glasman, the author of “Blue Labour”
presciently put it. In a world of huge and persistent inequalities, where
people can easily made to feel failures if they are not millionaires, to deny
people the sense of meaning that comes with nationhood and identity is both
cruel and psychologically deeply harmful. However, that is anathema to the
atomised, constantly churning world preferred by the elites, and imposition of
that elite culture on the unwilling majority is increasingly seen by the rest of us as nothing less than a
form of cultural terrorism.